Chinese SFF recommendation/best-of-the-year lists for works published in 2023
Quick links to the individual lists
Introduction
This page collects details of four recommended/year's best SFF lists published by
four Chinese organizations in late 2023/early 2024. Two of them are from publishers, and
their recommendations relate to nominations for the 2024 Hugo Awards, which are due to
be announced in a few days as I type this.
The other two lists are from
the Chinese SF Database (CSFDB) and
Douban; for those unfamiliar with the latter,
it' is usually compared to IMDB or
Goodreads in terms of the functionality and use-cases it supports.
The structure of these recommendations are quite different to the Hugo-focussed ones,
but (in my opinion at least) provide an interesting contrast.
Notes and caveats
Links using Chinese characters (hanzi) are to CSFDB; links using Latin/Roman/English
characters are to ISFDB.
Translators marked with a red asterisk * were not listed
as such in the original recommendation list.
If works have only been published outside China and/or not in Chinese, I've
omitted the Chinese title/author name.
For Chinese works, I've used any "official" English language title if one exists,
which may or may not be a close translation of the original title. (e.g. 天帆 might
be more literally translated as "Sky Sail" that the "Cosmo Wings" text that appears on
the cover of the book.) If there is no known official English title, then I've
used a mishmash of various machine translation tools to provide something that's
hopefully a reasonable approximation of the original.
Future Affairs Administration (FAA) published
a recommendation list last
year,
but this year the only work they put forward for Hugo consideration was the podcast
铥铥科幻电台 (Thulium Thulium SF Radio) in Best Fancast.
(Weibo post)
Release history
Date
Version
Comment
2024-03-26
1.0
Initial public release; several rough edges and things that need expanding, but
as time is pressing I'm putting this out as-is.
2024-03-30
1.1
Fixed several errors; flagged works that were 2024 Hugo finalists (or ineligibles
or declined); added the tables to show how successful or not the recs were in
garnering Hugo nominations.
None of the novels have (AFAIK) been announced as being published by SFW in China, but
that seems to be a reasonable
presumption, as three of them have some existing recent connection:
City of Last Chances is/was serialized in SFW Translations
The Best of Connie Willis was recently published by SFW, and there is an interview
with her in the March 2024 issue of the main magazine
The comic adaptation of Cyberpunk 2077 was published by SFW.
The Adventures in Space anthology that makes a number of older Chinese works
Hugo-eligible via their new English translations was also published in China in 2023
under the
title 光年之外 / Light Years Away.
The Best Editor recommendations are almost identical to last year' list; the only
differences that I see are:
贺子恒 / He Ziheng is no longer listed in Best Editor (Long Form).
2022 works were indicated as such in last year's list, but these year-indicators -
but not those works - have been removed.
星际驿站 /
Way Station
is added to 颜欢 / Yan Huan's list of works.
甲胄之殇 is removed from 钟睿一 / Zhong Ruiyi' list of works
As the Hugo rules
for this category state
"To be eligible the person must have edited at least 4 novel-length
(i.e. 40,000 words or more) books devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy in the
year of eligibility that are not anthologies or collections."
these lists of works aren't very helpful with regard to identifying relevant
works. The listing for 姚海军 / Yao Haijun has a slight mitigation in that it lists
series, rather than individual novels, but it's still down to a Hugo nominator
to work out what works are relevant.
In a similar vein, there is only one change to the details for Best Editor (Short Form)
compared to last year's recommendation list:
星云ⅩⅢ：赛博桃源记 is added for Wang Xu.
However I think the list of works for this category are valid, due to (a)
referring to the editorship of magazine issues, and (b) the Hugo rules only requiring
a single work to be published in the year of eligibility for the person to be
eligible.
Recommendations over 7 categories, with between 1 and 16 recommendations in each.
Several recommendations are debut works.
A couple of recommendations don't appear to be Hugo-eligible, due to being
published before 2023, and with no English-language translation published in 2023.
Artificial Gods (8 Light Minutes Culture, August 2020),
Tomorrow's Murder (8 Light Minutes Culture, March 2021),
Chinese Storiers on the Mars (8 Light Minutes Culture, September 2020),
Metaverse (8 Light Minutes Culture, April 2022),
The Growth Rings of Earth
(anthology, 8 Light Minutes Culture, April 2023)
Tables
2023 recommendation list
2024 recommendation list
#recommendations
#finalists
%finalists
#longlisted
%longlisted
#recommendations
#finalists
%finalists
Best Novel
3
0
0%
0
0%
1
0*
0%*
Best Novella
5
0
0%
1
20%
7
1
14%
Best Novelette
16
1
6%
2
13%
16
1*
6*
Best Short Story
2
0
0%
0
0%
13
1
8%
Best Graphic Story or Comic
0
0
0%
0
00%
1
1
100%
Best Related Work
1
1
100%
1
100%
1
1
100%
Best Editor Long Form
1
0
0%
1
100%
0
0
0%
Best Editor Short Form
2
1
50%
2
100%
2
2
100%
Astounding Award
1
0
0%
0
0%
0
0
0%
* - 2024 Best Novel numbers omit ineligible novel
天帆 / Cosmo Wings, and Best Novelette numbers omit declined novelette
极北之地 / The Far North.
Shine and Seeds of Mercury appear on both the SFW and 8LM lists.
We Live in Nanjing, Qualityland, Babel,
The Best of Greg Egan and Serpentine Band
appear in both the CSFDB and Douban lists.
CSFDB recommends The Inverted Tower of Babel and
Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, which also appear on the 8LM list.
The CSFDB list has the Adventures in Space anthology, from which several stories appear
on the SFW list. In a similar vein the Songs of Space Engineers anthology has a couple
of stories from the 8LM list.